A web article offering self-help for novelists* advises: “Think of choosing more active verbs in place of all your ‘was’ constructions.”
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A web article offering self-help for novelists* advises: “Think of choosing more active verbs in place of all your ‘was’ constructions.”
Choose walked rather than was walking wherever possible, it says: “The latter invokes stronger, more active images.” And “Catch all of those ‘It was;' ‘there were;' constructions.” In fact, unless you are consciously striving to sound literary, “be highly suspicious of any sentence beginning with or containing this structure.”
I worry that some budding novelists actually read stuff like this, and even try to follow its advice. Two minutes of study should be enough to convince them not to. The guidance is insane. No one could swallow it if they took a serious look at successful fiction.
Where to begin with rebutting its silliness? Let’s start right at the top: the latest Jack Reacher novel, The Midnight Line (2017), by the master thriller writer Lee Child.
A recent house guest kindly left a hardback copy in my apartment, so I have it immediately to hand.
No one writes tougher or more laconic prose than Lee Child. Or makes sentences shorter or choppier. Or builds more narrative tension. Or depicts more fast-moving and violent action scenes. (See? Just thinking about him is making me write like him.)
How far into The Midnight Line do we have to read before we find one of those cases of was that novelists should avoid? Sixteen words. Here are the novel’s first two sentences:
Jack Reacher and Michelle Chang spent three days in Milwaukee. On the fourth morning she was gone.
(Forgive me if you feel patronized by my boldfacing that was, but people seem so inattentive to evidence that I often feel like I have to lead them by the hand.)
Lee Child is bold enough to use was whenever he wants. He could easily have avoided it, by writing On the fourth morning she left. And that would have ruined his exposition. You see why? The next sentence says:
Reacher came back to the room with coffee and found a note on his pillow.
Although the narration is in the third person, we’re seeing things through Reacher’s eyes. She didn’t leave, from his perspective. He came back with coffee for them both, and she was simply absent.
“Chang’s note was indirect,” Child tells us — with another use of was. And already he has built up tension: I assume you’re as keen to know what the note said as I was. (It said: “You’re like New York City. I love to visit, but I could never live there.” One more woman has realized that she could never live with this homeless drifter.)
Wikipedia says Lee Child’s writing has been called “‘hardboiled’ and ‘commercial’ in style, with short sentences, often without a verb.” It’s true. He writes terse, lonely-tough-guy crime stories better than anyone in the world. He’s sold 70 million books. It would be deranged to tell him to improve his writing by avoiding the most frequent verb in the language (the verb known to grammarians as be, with inflectional forms been, being, am/’m, are/’re, aren’t, is/’s, isn’t, was, wasn’t, were, and weren’t).
Yet writing tutors, editors, and authors of how-to-write guides constantly repeat similar nonsense. Perhaps they pick it up from Page 18 of Strunk & White, an early source for the now familiar mistake of starting out warning against the passive voice and then drifting aimlessly on to vaguely condemn other constructions with be.
The web listicle I referred to certainly seems to think it is talking about the passive voice; in fact it is titled “5 Easy Tips to Help Remove Passive Voice in Your Novel.” I wasn’t surprised to see that the author can’t tell actives from passives (calling The noise was terrifying and made her way “passive” when they’re not). This is familiar territory for me. Graduate-student TAs for freshman writing classes circle each instance of “was” and write “Passive!” in the margin (take a look at this scan of a page from a history paper, for example; 7 of the TA’s 10 corrections are erroneous). But here I’m just focusing on the assertion that it will improve your prose if you shun the commonest verb in English. Trust me, it won’t.
That doesn’t mean I’m advising writers to use as many instances of was as they possibly can. What I’m saying is that the laudable goal of writing well and the effort to avoid be and its inflectional forms have nothing to do with each other.
* I won’t link to the piece, because that might seem like a recommendation. It’s embarrassingly dreadful. You’ll find it with Google if you want to.
